That's a great question. I think the thing that is a cautionary tale, once you try to break a large project into small ones, is this idea of false incrementalism. Sometimes you see an idea where you'll take a large project and you'll say, “Here's phase one, here's phase two, here's phase three and here's phase four”. The question that anyone in a leadership position should be asking is whether, when they did that, it was still useful if they only ever did phase one or two. If they just stopped there, would it still add public value?
Of course, if you're delivering software on a regular basis and actually shipping it out the door for the public to use and to get feedback so that people actually benefit from it, then it's still useful after only one phase or only two phases. If it's a five- or 10-phased project that's only useful at the very end, five years later, then you haven't actually broken it down. You've just given little labels to it. Actually shipping something out the door for the public to use—that's the real defining factor between genuinely breaking things into smaller pieces or false incrementalism where it looks like you did but it's not actually benefiting the public.